badgenome said:
Which two, pray tell? The schizo Jared Loughner who didn't even bother to vote in 2010 (you know, the Tea Party's banner year) despite voting in the two previous elections? Joe Stack, whose manifesto was pure Occupy Wall Street? Or maybe Bill Sparkman bought so strongly into anti-government rhetoric that he decided all government workers had to go, starting with himself. The telling thing is that the media often tiptoes around the views of outspoken jihadists like Nidal Hasan, and despite the (not really) anti-war movement's extreme rhetoric during the Bush years, the media didn't try to pin every random instance of violence on them. But now that the scary conservatives are the ones who are pissed off about being out of power, the media regularly rushes to hang anything around their neck until it's proven otherwise. And once they finally have to admit that there was no link, the damage has already been done and it's an established meme that Jared Loughner was a Sarah Palin fanboy or some such nonsense. |
The media's search for Tea-Party ties to violence bothers me far less than the media's unwillingess to report on the criminal/violent side of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, G8/G20 protests, or even union protests. If they were searching for motivation for an act and looking at political background as one possibility it would be fine, but it is clear that they're looking to slander one political movement while protecting others for undisclosed reasons; and the most likely reason is they're heavily biased.
